Tetris tots?

I have a one-year-old daughter who I'm currently trying to teach not to play with her food. This isn't helping. US Foods now has Tetris tetromino-shaped tater tots. Now I want to play with my food. They're calling them "Puzzle Potatoes" for obvious licensing reasons, but it also looks like they left out the long straight piece. How am I going to get that bonus?

I'd probably cut my ear off if I had to listen to Mal's mouth all the time.

Twenty27Designs has re-imagined Van Gogh's Starry Night with a Joss Whedon twist. You can show off your Browncoat loyalty with a Starry Flight t-shirt for 19.95, or check out more geeky designs on Facebook or Tumblr.

it's time to play the music

I'm not sure I've ever described a cellist as "badass" before, but now seems like a good time to start.
The band you see here is Critical Hit. By the time you read this, I will have remedied my lack of their video game cover album.

No. No no no no no no no. no.

Geekosystem has more on the first official Tetris costumes and how they've already been banned from one London bar because people would come in wearing them so they could reserve space for their friends. As Geeko points out, the "ban" is almost absolutely a publicity stunt engineered by Morph Costume Co., which makes the costumes. But I don't care. The image of people wearing these in line at con panels so they can save room for friends unwilling to spend the required amount of time waiting is dancing before my eyeballs.
Nobody do that.
(Via Geekosystem, picture by Paul Clarke)
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Just in time for Halloween!

It's hard to believe that there hadn't been licensed Tetris costumes on the market before -- after all, it's such a simple concept. Now a company in the UK has finally secured the rights to these iconic blocks, so of course the very first thing they did was send a bunch of people out to a fancy pub and get in everyone's way.

Gotta fit 'em all!

It almost goes without saying now that the two most addictive things to come out of portable gaming are the brick-racking frenzy of Tetris, and the monster-collecting of Pokemon. So it seems odd that it's taken this long for a developer to mash these ideas up, but that's just what EA's done with recently announced game Tetris Monsters.

Conceivably, you could do this on your own. In practice? Just watch this algorithm do it.

From programmer Michael Birken comes a new way of drawing video game characters that is probably more complicated than it needs to be, but all the more incredible for it. Birken has designed an algorithm that can place single blocks of color in Tetris by strategically building and destroying lines at lightning speed. Precisely place enough blocks, and you've got a made to order line. Stack enough lines and the result is a pixellated picture of...well, anything you want, in principle, though Birken started off training the program to build images of classic 8-bit characters like Mario, Link, and Samus. As you might expect, the process that makes it happen is bafflingly complex, but the results -- as seen in this video -- are stunning.

After a long day at work, there's not much more therapeutic than a round of blasting terrorists or aliens or zombies whatever your bad guy of choice. But if you're looking for a video game to cure something a little more substantial than the frustrations of your cubicle, you might think you're out of luck. Not if you suffer from a lazy eye, though! It turns out that can be treated with Tetris.